Category Archives: Strategy

Killing Time Sinks

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Just over a week ago, I started playing World of Warcraft(again) and I was have a great time getting back into the game.  Unfortunately, for you guys it completely knocked out my time for blogging and also some of my other things that I enjoy. My estimate for in-game time is over 40 hours for the week, that’s a full time job, what the hell could I have been thinking. So I’m going to write down a list of ways to seek and remove time sinks.

Do a Weekly Analysis for 1-2 Weeks

You don’t have to over thorough with you tracking, but every couple of hours write down what your doing. If you do something that could take a few hours write before you start and when you end, including the time for each. At the end of the week, compile all that information and look for stuff that appears rather excessive and see if you can cut it out; for me excessive would be anything above 6-8 hours for the week. Obviously, you can’t cut sleep, dining, or commuting out completely, but it is possible to cut back.

How to Cut Back

If say reading too much(though I don’t think that’s possible), you could cut the number of books available to you so that you read them more slowly and cherish them, or maybe it’s a social activity, you can cut your funding so that you have to stay home. Find a way to either make the time have more value, rather than desaturate it with over use, or put a flow valve on it so that you can constrict it. If it’s possible you could also just go cold turkey and cut it completely, this was my choice in canceling my subscription and removing the software from my system.

Find Something Productive to Fill the Time

This is the big one anytime you try to stop a habit, you need a distraction to prevent you from going back to your old ways.  You need something that you find interesting and will add value to your life. Here are a few, some that I plan on using

  • Blogging( I know I already am, I want to do it more frequently)
  • Freelancing
  • Programming
  • Reading
  • Focused Topical Learning
  • Get A Job
  • Head Back to School

3 Types Of People You Just Can’t Forget

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I got to reminiscing over the last 6 months at my job. I’ve seen several hundred customers come and go but only remember maybe 20 names. So I asked myself if I could group them into categories to figure out what made them so special, I came up with 3 groups that contain them.

Douchebags

These are the guys that do pretty much anything to make your job just a bit harder. They can be overly pushy when you tell them that you’re unable to assist them. They will do anything to get what they want and don’t give a damn whether it’s possible on your end, but their persistence though annoying sticks with you. You use them to benchmark  your other customers. These guys stick out because they ruffle your feathers and they just beckon to be remembered.

Nice Guys

This group you don’t want to forget because they are the few people who can brighten your day up. They can call you up on short notice and you don’t have anything for them that’s decent but they are happy to take what you have to offer and so glad that you could get them out of there bind. I had one guy, Mr. Bruce, that wouldn’t stop smiling it was just so remarkably odd, normally I see people who are upset because they got into an accident or their flight was canceled. These are the people you want to come back again and again just so they can cheer you up.

Frequenters

These people come in maybe once every month or two and setup there reservations before they ever leave. You get to know exactly what they want when they show up. You really don’t want to forget frequenters because they are probably 20-30% of your business in my small town. You can’t offend them because they will go to your competitors and are unlikely to come back.

These are the 3 groups that I just can’t forget, I know them all by name and see someone from one of these groups atleast once per week. One thing about these groups though is that they aren’t self contained, I’ve got frequent nice guys and frequent douchebags. I’ve also managed to get a nice douchebag, I assume it’s just because I’m not used to the abrasiveness of people from NYC, they don’t come to small town West Virginia that often.  I bet if you wanted you could even make your self unforgetable by mixing them with your own style.

Owning Your Brand

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Had a discussion on Twitter over how much you would pay for your brand and the reasons why you would want to own it. Today, with the internet everyone can own his/her brand, but with the brand comes the brand identity across the board which you might not be able to capitalize on if someone else already has it. Now it’s important to possess your name across the major urls and also across the major social media spectrum. There are 4 major reasons that you would want to own your brand across the board.

1. Easy to Find: Sharing an unanimous identity across the spectrum means that people only need to know that one aspect to find you on their favorite service. This makes it easier for you to not ostracize your followers by not being where they feel comfortable.

2. Reputation Proceeds You: If someone knows you from another service it will make it easier for you to gain following as you enter a new service. You also will have a beacon set up for when followers from another service come looking for you.

3. Protection From Miscreants: This is probably one of the big ones in this day and age. If someone shares the name with you and they do something that could only be viewed in a negative light; they are going to hurt your brand.

4. Multiple Connection Points: You can connect with people on multiple fronts in a multitude of ways. This provides heightened connectivity with those around you. Allows you to create deeper relationships that connecting on only one front.

5 Life Lessons You Can Learn From Poker

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I used to play a lot of poker, but I quit while I was trying to bring my grades back up and also had a long streak of losses. Recently, I began playing about 2-3 games a week just for fun and realized that a lot of what I’ve learned about business, entrepreneurship, and finance are key to the game. You don’t have to play poker to understand these principles that make it easier to be a winner in life and on the felt.

  1. Bankroll Management:This is definitely one of the largest keys to the game of poker, making sure you can still be in the game when your opportunity arises. The concept is that your allowing yourself to achieve the maximum value at the lowest risk possible. If your good at managing your stack you can take a small stack and still come out on top, do the same with your skills, talents, and money and you will can build a great life. This is the foundation that you build off of.
  2. Aggressively Take Chances: The more you risk in the early stages the easier it will be to recoup losses or exploit your massive advantage in mid- and late-game. This becomes especially true if you are good at managing your bankroll.
  3. Know When to Back Down: The corollary to number 2, being aggressive can put your in a winning position in most situations, but if you get cocky you might end up losing everything. You may scare away the source of your income. It’s up to you to toss a few hands, either due to the fact that your hand sucks or just to provide an incorrect position to your competition.
  4. Opportunities are not Rare: Yes, this may not be 100 percent true in life; it is in poker though.  Every hand your dealt is an opportunity to advance, in life you have probably on average one opportunity every day. The problem is that most people don’t have the skills to see opportunities in their peripheral, only the obvious ones that stand out right in front of them.
  5. Luck is a Factor: Every person is dealt a different starting hand, sometimes you will be beat before you ever see your hand. The only thing that you can do is try to take advantage of what you’ve been giving.

Reformation Of The Self

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Lately, all my foundations have begun to collapse. My filing systems, both physical and virtual, aren’t functioning at a proper capacity to keep me organized. I’m overloading them with great stuff but it’s becoming harder for me to keep up with everything. At least until the New Year, I’ll be working on refiling and reprocessing pretty much every aspect of my life. Since, I’ll be working on this the next two weeks I’ll be putting up some (older) introspective pieces on myself to let you get to know me a little better, these are some of the defining moments in my short life, thus far.

Physical Filing Objectives that I’ll be working on is finding a way to organize my books and films so that I don’t have to dig through piles to find what I’m looking for; right now, I count 15 stacks of books scattered around my room. I’ll be going through and organizing all my bank and credit statements, balancing everything out of course.

Virtual Filing Objectives that I’ll be working on are setting up a better system for RSS feeds, right now I’m satisfied with the system but, with 3+ hours a day it’s just too much. I’ll be redoing my bookmarking so I can find web pages that I use on a more consistent basis and links from others saved for reading. I’ll be redoing the majority of my computers filing system as it has files scattered in random folders.

With the blog I’m working on a redesign that fits who I am and provides a cleaner interface than the one that your reading this on, even I find it hard to read on. I’m also debating on adding more content that fits the innovation theme. Originally I had planned on this being a more technology focused blog with a few political and philosophically innovative ideas; if you look back that’s not how it turned out.

So for the next few weeks I’ll be doing some introspection, try and clear my mind, and get set to roll out some better content in ’09. This is mainly for my benefit but hopefully it results in some positive effects for you also. I think I may continue this process every year if it turns out something that is effective. This idea of redeveloping your internal and external systems is something that everyone should try to force change on themselves.

Our Childrens Economy: Social Security

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The United States is growing ever closer towards bankruptcy and we just keep piling on more and more debt. People don’t blame Bush it’s the law of compounding interest and providing too many services. One of the more pronounced services that is out there is Social Security. I find that it is quite possibly the largest disservice for the future of the country.

Social Security is the funds that are taken automatically from workers pay for retirement funding, unemployment,  disability, spousal and children, and widow benefits. All of these, except for the retirement, unemployment, and widow benefits, were not part of the original bill and the widow benefits have changed from lump-sum to the continued monthly payments of the deceased spouse. The original bill proposal was highly controversial in and was opposed because it would result in the loss of jobs. However, some said that this was an advantage as it encouraged the elderly to retire, opening positions for the youth.

The problem is that now the elderly are working longer and are less encouraged to leave, resulting in harder positioning for the younger generations. The fact that this pay comes from the workers who should be the younger generation means that this is impacting their future coverage. The average age of workers is also beginning to go up and at ~15% per worker and at a 5.8:1 worker/retired we are slowly sliding into a Social Security deficit; projections show that the ratio will drop to 3.1:1 meaning that we won’t even be providing half the coverage that’s promised.

While researching this, I discovered that the Social Security spending for the ’07 Fiscal Year was $580 billion, this is annualized process that increases every year. Honestly, we’re worried about the government spending $900 billion just once, sure it was on bad loans, but it’s actually going to help stabilize the country while we prepare for the long run. Social Security is ripping off the future generations to pay for it’s promises.

I propose that we introduce a retro-active grandfather clause that will reduce the rates of which people are accustomed will be receiving.  You reduce funding to anyone who was born since January 1, 1963(45 years old as of 1/1/09) to 70% of what they where promised once they reach 67, regressing the rate by 5% for every subsequent year until age 35. Anyone between the ages of 35 and 30 shall receive 25% and anyone below 30 will recieve nothing.  We have this bill continue until the year 2100 and direct excess funding towards the federal deficit. I would not have a problem having the tax remain in my wages so long as it is going to help sustain the state of the country in the future. This isn’t even as drastic as what we need but, it is an initial idea to help us get it started.

This is just my two cents on my subject, and in fact this would actually be excluding myself(19 years old). Though it wouldn’t matter there is nothing left for my generation or future generations, either way. Please leave some comments on what you think of this subject.

Building Your Brand Like A Punk Band

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I’ve recently noticed several bands that I used to listen to, occasionally, back in the late 90’s have been coming back with hits on the mainstream radio. The single common denominator of them all is their genres the fusion of Punk and Hard Rock. This is stunning me because looking back on their origins they have been around a generation and their just hitting their mainstream strides.

I’ll list throw out a few names here: The Offspring, Pennywise, Weezer, Incubus, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day, and Chris Cornell(Soundgarden and Audioslave). All of these bands originated in the period between 84-93, to very niche groups at that time. They also didn’t see huge growth in their fans like bands do now a day, but also grew slowly enough to handle the pressure, preventing premature collapse. They also forged new paths in the music industry. These are bands that are good to invest in but are hard to find.

Build your brand like you are a punk band. Don’t go big to begin with unless you know your going to be able to sustain the pressure. You want to start off with your niche and then expand slowly through trust and ability. This will give you time to develop a strong following that will stick with you through a flop to see a future success. You just need to keep cranking your stuff out and they will come.